In our previous post, we introduced the environmental debate raging between what Matt Ridley calls the Ecologists and the Economists in his April 25 Wall Street Journal article 'The Scarcity Fallacy'. We wrote that this is the familiar debate between what is better called environmental Optimists and Pessimists, or Malthusians and Anti-Malthusian, or Environmentalists and Anti-environmentalists. We presented the “optimistic” position, listing and discussing nine of their arguments.
Today, we present the alternative position - that of the (neo-)Malthusians, or the ”pessimists.” This is basically the environmental position, and it is also our own position, by and large. The best-known modern-day neo-Malthusian is Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich. Here are some of the major arguments:
We concluded the first half of this article by pointing out the difficulty of predicting the future by studying the past. However, the pessimists remind us that probabilistically the past is the best predictor of the future. Someone who has often been a klutz is more likely to be a klutz again than someone who has not been one. And there are things that are 99.9999% sure to happen. For example, it IS a certainty that we will run out of fossil fuels.
Examples of depleted resources are innumerable and inescapable. Water among them, the wellspring of life itself. Aquifers are vanishing as we speak, especially in California, where one of us lives, and other even dryer regions. Will desalinization come to the rescue, or is its cost prohibitive? Sometimes, new technologies are no more than pie-in-the sky. Whatever happened to cloud seeding, a great promise when we were young?
Ridley’s position is that “There are NO limits to growth.” This is patently absurd. Here are some recent anecdotal news items which should give the optimists some pause:
Recent Anecdotal Bad News
The Antarctic ice shelf is collapsing
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The newly discovered California
Monterey shale oil reserve is 96% useless.
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The environmental cost of beef and
other meat production - grazing land use, water, etc. - is becoming
prohibitive. For this reason alone, even apart from humanitarianism,
vegetarianism must be the wave of the future.
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And what about the following factoids?
Some Biodiversity Factoids
An area of rainforest the size of a
football field is cut down or burned every second, or an area the
size of Belgium every two and a half months. Nearly 2% of rain
forests disappear every year.
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Less than 5% of the earth’s land
surface is protected in parks, reserves and wildlife sanctuaries.
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On average, two new bird species
are discovered every year.
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Nearly one distinct group of the world’s people becomes extinct every week. Approximately fifty cultures disappear each year. 700 distinct languages and cultures exist on the island of New Guinea, one fifth of all those found on earth.
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Fewer than 6,000 tigers remain in the wild. Poaching for use in traditional Asian medicines and habitat loss pose the biggest threat to these magnificent cats.
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But there is no need to rely on anecdotes. The scientific community is 99% unanimous on the FACT of HUMAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING. Climate change denial is widespread, especially in the United States. The rejection of global warming is part of the rejection of science in general, including Darwinism. In addition, powerful economic interests are arrayed against environmentalism,including the fossil fuel industry and capitalism itself, which is predicated on endless economic growth. It was reported recently that the Fox TV network had the highest rate of factual errors in its news reporting, namely 63%. Not a surprise, since that network is the most opposed to science.
There are now 7.5 billion people in the world, and about a billion cars. When the two authors of this article were in high school, there were 2.5 billion people - ONE THIRD of today’s population. Soon there will be 12 billion people. The Chinese, the Indians, the Indonesians, the Brazilians and others all want to “come on board” as well. If things continue in that direction, there will be 6 or 7 billion cars in the world. How will mother Earth handle this, even if we all drive Smarts?
What about “technology to the rescue?” According to economist Joseph Tainter, innovation also suffers from diminishing returns. Recycling techniques, the introduction of new forms of energy, medical innovations, research and new inventions are all increasingly complex and costly. Eventually the cost of progress outweighs its benefit. Problems arise which require new solutions, which require higher levels of complexity, which creates new problems, and so forth.
Furthermore, the increasing cost and complexity which accompany growth contribute to increasing inequality,because they fall disproportionately on the masses, while the benefits accrue disproportionately to the elite.
Right now, there is a number of small and affluent countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands and Denmark which are demographically stagnant and aim for very slow economic growth. They are also switching from bad energy (coal, oil) to good energy (wind). This is prudent and wise, and the rest of the world should follow their example.
The fact that Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s predictions have not yet come to pass doesn’t mean that they never will. What’s more, isn’t it probable that the Malthusian and environmental activists have made a significant contribution to the defeat of their own predictions? After all, isn’t their goal precisely that - to ensure that their prophecies become self-defeating?
4 comments:
it is important to be optimistic and it is true that the way that we see the world is associated with our perceptions of it in the first place-
I think that humans play a huge role in making the world a better place:-)
Gail
The problem with the Malthusians is that they have never been right. You mentioned in the first post the report of the Club of Rome - have any of the projections proved even remotely correct?
Malthus' calculations were based on American census data - unfortunately Mr Malthus failed to account for immigration data - so the huge increase in population was an illusion. He also failed to anticipate the invention of the steel plow which a few years after Malthus tried his ruse increased crop yields significantly. Ehrlich failed to understand the work of Norman Bourlag.
Scarcity, even with water, is a problem but only a temporal one. As Julian Simon demonstrated - in his bet wit Ehrlich and in his books about the "Ultimate Resource" human ingenuity always eventually trumps scarcity.
"The fact that Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s predictions have not yet come to pass doesn’t mean that they never will." sounds a lot like WP Kinsella's "if you build it they will come. " The problem with Malthus and Ehrlich and the rest of the Malthusians is that their supposed high science is really just lousy research that begins with a conclusion masquerading as thinking.
Hi, Tom,
Thanks for your thoughtful analyses of different positions. I’ve learned from your presentation. By the way, speaking of scarce energetic resources, I will be visiting later this month the Lawrence-Livermore Fusion lab., the greatest concentration of resources on the topic, and perhaps the first to have already announced some promising results (ie. Producing more energy from fusion than is spent on producing it, though on a very small scale.)
Let me make a case for Matt Ridley’s contrast between ‘ecologists and economists’ as opposed to your alternatives. If I see these two categories, I clearly understand the two positions: one has a concern for the ecology and thinks it is worth giving up some economic benefits to protect it; the other stresses that the economy should have priority, that market forces will take care of problems, find solutions as old resources or approaches become scarce and too expensive.
In contrast, the three alternatives you suggest do not provide that contrast unless I already know the context. ‘Environmental optimists or pessimists’ could contrast those in the environmental movement who think it is still possible to stop global warming (e.g.) and those in the same movement who think we’ve already reached the tipping point. Malthusians and anti-malthusians focus only on population and could contrast those who think exponential growth is unavoidable with those who think that self-correction has already occurred in many more advanced nations; Environmentalist and anti-environmentalists, though a closer approximation, focuses more on those who might think: “I couldn’t care less about those Monarch butterflies” than on those who may not care much about those butterflies but who also put their faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the free-market to find solutions to problems of scarcity. ‘Ecologists and economists’ provides a clear contrast between two positions that could enlighten the debate.
I thank Gail, Jonathan and Edric for their comments.
Jonathan basically reiterates the “optimistic” position, adding some criticism of the research methods used by Malthus and neo-Malthusians. The usual stuff. But of course, there is no way that optimists can make a serious dent in the research that conclusively and definitively proves man-made global warming. That debate is over.
As to Edric:
Your main criticism is about the labels which best describe the dichotomy under discussion. So be it.
You are right that “Malthusianism” focuses on the demographic dimension of this issue (as opposed to monarch butterflies, global warming, or other aspects). I suppose the article veered that way because one of us is a sociologist who has often taught and written about population (Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, said that “demography is destiny.”).
You also wisely mention population “self-correction” which has already occurred in advanced nations. Yes, that is the so-called demographic transition. The transition from agricultural societies with familistic values and high birthrates to (post-)industrial societies with high standard of living and middle-class/materialistic/high quality-of-life values and low birthrates. Fine. I have always liked the demographic transition theory.
At the same time: consider the following scary factoid: When we were teenagers in the 1950s, the world’s population was 2.5 billion - one third of what it is now!
Also: assume the world’s population was about 2 billion during the 1914-1945 period which saw the most devastating wars in all of history. Assume the two world wars killed 100 million people (including the Holocaust and 35 million Russians). That's 5% of the world’s population, yet even during those 3 decades, population grew inexorably (by 2% per year). Don't we resemble rabbits?
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I also have some personal notes to add here, triggered by Edric's comments about Lawrence-Livermore, and also in response to Bob’s comment to the first part of this article:
I few years ago, I participated in a commemoration of Edward Teller at the Lawrence-Livermore lab. It’s a small world: Edward Teller was a math student of my great-grandfather's, who was president of the University of Budapest and who wrote the book on integral mathematics (I still have a copy of it).
As to Bob's earlier comment about Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek and Delft University (the Dutch MIT): Several of my co-students in gymnasium in Amsterdam went on to study at Delft.
So you see, like Forrest Gump, if you mention a place or an event, I was there, haha...
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